“Even the air is palpable in Tumbling…The story moves forth on the power of Ms. Suddenly and unexpectedly a family, Herbie, Noon, and their two girls draw closer-until an outside threat to run a highway through their community awakens a fire in Noon, causing her to rise up and fight to hold her family and her community together. Then one day an infant girl is left on their doorstep, and later it happens again this time a five-year-old girl is abandoned at their home. But their marriage remains unconsummated because of a horrible event in Noon’s past, so each seeks comfort elsewhere: Noon in the warm acceptance of the neighborhood church Herbie in the arms of Ethel, a jazz singer. Noon and Herbie are deeply in love and living in their tightly knit African American neighborhood. Set in South Philadelphia during the 1940s and 1950s, Tumbling combines the mood of an urban community with the vitality of its inhabitants to tell a story of the ties that bind us, and the secrets that keep us apart. (Feb.Purchase Audiobook Tumbling A Wall Street Journal’s Book Club selection Despite patches of warmth and humor, melodrama prevails over some flashing moments which remind one of McKinney-Whetstone's potential. Subplots of minor consequence overshadow the primary story, and McKinney-Whetstone's adult characters are too unreflective to win our sympathy. Pushed beyond their limits, the girls at last run away and the adults must work together to find them. The children's and adults' lives are complicated by various betrayals: Mae abuses Ramona's credit Ramona's boyfriend, Tyrone, finds comfort with another woman (while Ramona pines for Tyrone's father) and Mae's favorite cousin sexually assaults Shern.
When an old criminal conviction denies custody of the girls to the aunts and uncles, the children are placed in a nightmarish foster home run by compulsive gambler Mae and her adult daughter, Ramona. Already fragile, Clarise is hospitalized with a breakdown. Soon, three beautiful daughters-Shern, Victoria and Bliss-complete their vision of bourgeois happiness, but the repeal of Jim Crow laws lures their best customers away to white catering chains, and Finch dies in a last-ditch effort to save his faltering business. Raised by her affectionate, idiosyncratic aunts and uncles after her mother's death, middle-class Clarise elopes with a poor but talented cook named Finch, and together they open their own successful catering business. With overreaching prose and overwhelming family tangles, McKinney-Whetstone's return to black Philadelphia, this time in the 1960s, never quite lives up to the promise of her debut, Tumbling.
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